Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:28:32 PM
It took me 30 seconds to say "1 peasant family yields 12gp per month" and then it took me 10 years to figure out everything that implies about the world. People often do the former and think they've created domain rules, but they almost never do the latter. Then they wonder why their campaign world makes no sense ("I can't afford to field an army based on my population!") and handwave it.

Not being able to afford to field an army seems extremely Medieval, practically Harn-esque. 

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:28:32 PM
The ACKS model is, without exaggeration, better than anything being used in academia to model ancient economics, to the point that PhDs who have dug into it have suggested I should be publishing academic papers based on it.

Was it Greg Clark who said that modern economic models are great for understanding ancient economies, it's modern/industrial economies we have no idea about? 

Pre-industrial economies are based on human and animal labour, plus land/crops, and IME are amazingly consistent and predictable, as you have of course discerned.  Your 12 gp/month output per peasant family is higher than the 5gp/month I use as rule of thumb (it seemed to fit with the numbers I could find for ancient Rome & Greece, Middle Ages feudal Europe of course was not a cash based economy) but I suspect we're either valuing a GP differently, or modelling something slightly different.

Actually...

From what I can recall, the number I had for ancient Rome was around £20/day per adult in modern UK money, 2 SP at 1 SP = £10, which for a family of 2 productive adults is 4 SP/day, which is 120 SP/month, which is...

12 GP/month.  Damn you Macris. You win.

(I think the 5 GP/month figure I had was going off old BECMI D&D numbers from the 1980s, where daily income was 1 SP = $10. Modern 5e uses 2 SP daily income, $20 or £20) 

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:28:32 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 10:22:16 AM
I am aware your system has magic things in it as options. I was asking more:
How are your arbitrary picks for how magic would affect economics/sociology any different from just GM fiat or benchmarking?
Doesn't that seem to be a lot of effort for a simulation that just reaches a black box of non-existentium that just shrugs and says "Figure it out?".

They're not arbitrary. They are finely tuned and carefully integrated. The idea that choices can be "arbitrary" is exactly why most domain systems fail. An economy is an interlocking system with emergent properties. GM Fiat cannot address emergent properties and benchmarking leads to absurd results if you don't cross-check the benchmarks against each other, which you can only do if you have a system built to check them with.

It took me 30 seconds to say "1 peasant family yields 12gp per month" and then it took me 10 years to figure out everything that implies about the world. People often do the former and think they've created domain rules, but they almost never do the latter. Then they wonder why their campaign world makes no sense ("I can't afford to field an army based on my population!") and handwave it. They wrongly conclude that handwaving is better because they didn't actually do the hard part of the game design.

I've done the hard work so others don't have to. The ACKS economy has a:

- Demographics of heroism that calculates exactly how many characters of each level there are, based on the availability of activities that let them gain XP, along with their average age, class, etc.

- Bottom-up model. Mixed farming, goat herding, sheep herding, cattle herding, pig farming, olive growing, and wine making are all modeled at the scale of the family, as are lumberjacking, mining, and stone quarrying. I know how much they eat, how much of each good they produce, how much of each good they consume, what their surplus is, etc. All of these are modeled on historical data.

- Top-down model. There's a complete circular flow for the entire continent which calculates the GDP overall, as well as the production quantity of every type of good in the game, and determines how many families are required to satisfy the caloric requirements for different foods, the workforce required for the mines and lumber needed, etc., with every gp entirely accounted for in the circular flow, and with all the input values derived from the bottom-up model.

- Circular Magic model. There's an "economy" of arcane power and divine power based on worship, sacrifice, and reagents. The number of spellcasters of each level is calculated, along with the average amount of research they can do per month, which in turn tells us the inputs required of arcane and divine power and the output of magic items or ritual magic. There's then a depreciation model for loss of magic items of different types each year to anti-magic, destruction, being lost, etc. From this the number of magic items in the world can be calculated based on population growth, and matched to the known wealth of NPCs to determine how many magic items a typical emperor has, etc.

And much more. It just goes on and on. It's over 10 years of work put into it. The ACKS economic system is so good that I was able to use it to predict where Diocletian's prices in his Edict of Prices were *necessarily* wrong. I then researched those specific prices and, voila, I found that other scholars working from historical sales contracts, archeology, etc., had also concluded that those prices were wrong. My model spit out right answers without that data because the model is right. The ACKS model is, without exaggeration, better than anything being used in academia to model ancient economics, to the point that PhDs who have dug into it have suggested I should be publishing academic papers based on it.

So, yah, it's a lot of work. And maybe a lot of people don't care. But it's not arbitrary and it's not something you can emulate with GM fiat or benchmarking.

I don't know about actual economy, GDP growth or production of goods, but suff like levels and XP are game constructs with no a direct real life parallel. And character progression can vary widely by campaign, based on the type of system used by the game or the GM. How XP awards themselves work are already a subject of debate and have a lot of built-in assumptions that are next to impossible to take as objective outside of "it works that way in my game". Stuff like XP for gold, for example, is something that could take up its own thread for me to explain why I hate it passionately and consider it a ridiculous game convention. It has no objective basis on reality outside of "it worked that way in old D&D and the OSR are obsessed with it".

So I'd definitely say that any system that purports to give "accurate" population numbers by character level would, by necessity be arbitrary. There's no way something based entirely around one person's interpretation of how XP awards and level progression should work (both of which are purely abstract game conventions that vary by game even within D&D/d20 System itself) could be anything but arbitrary, or work anywhere outside the context of a specific game built around a specific set of conceits that could not apply universally.

If you accept those conceits as something you want in your game it might give you figures, but whether those figures accurately reflect reality is up for grabs. Similar would apply to magic, since all of this stuff works based on conceits and rules for item creation and magic use that don't universally apply outside a specific game, and we have no way to verify in real life.

And this is not even getting into whether I truly need accurate population data and production figures to run an irregular elf game every few weeks where characters are just gonna crawl down a hole somewhere or invade an enemy encampment to kill some "bad guys" and take their gold. And the group might end up creating new characters before their current ones ever get to domain management stuff. That sort of stuff only works on a specific type of campaign with a specific type of player.

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:28:32 PMIt took me 30 seconds to say "1 peasant family yields 12gp per month" and then it took me 10 years to figure out everything that implies about the world.

Err, that's GM (Or creator) fiat. And also a GM/creator benchmark you set. Now Im sure you're better at maths than me, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't in any way closely calculate a....World peasant average for...GP output? And especially not in 30 seconds. Id hazard a guess that model would do a lot of picking and choosing of what would be more important/fun to actually use in practice even if less accurate/unrealistic. The game development wouldn't be arbitrary, but from the standpoint of modeling reality, it would absolutely be.

Now to be clear I believe that underneath all TTRPG rules ever is basically GM handwaving, which is what separates them from boardgames which have 100% ironclad rules. And rules are generally guideposts. I find the amount of guideposts and the kind to be very important, but the core engine of that is the collective group deciding what is important to model or keep in mind or not.

I can absolutely believe you can have a stronger preference for more guideposts, but its still arbitrary for an emulation of feel to your game. Im not saying the choices you made for your game are just bad. Im saying that they ultimately conform to "Be fun" rather then "Be 1000% realistic". Otherwise every session would be 5 hours of economic simulation per day before any characters do any actions.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 06:08:57 PM
I'm pretty sure I couldn't in any way closely calculate a....World peasant average for...GP output?

You couldn't nowadays, at least it wouldn't mean much, but the pre-industrial numbers are amazingly consistent over time, just a very very slow uptick in productivity (due to a few innovations such as mouldboard ploughs, horseshoes, harness that doesn't choke the horse, better metallurgy et all).

One thing that's very clear from pre-industrial numbers is that no one lived in "dollar a day" poverty - though they may have died in dollar a day poverty. People were producing in the region of $20-$25 dollars a day consistently across thousands of years.

Quote from: S'mon on May 21, 2023, 06:18:20 PMpre-industrial numbers are amazingly consistent over time

But even as you stated productivity/measure of output is relative. And that's productivity for what peasant? In what place? Void-vania?

And all of this is for 100% real theoretical peasants. Now we introduce different locations, geographies, histories, and places and now estimating peasants of "Not the Real world-istan" becomes increasingly strenous.

And then we introduce magic. At which point, unless making arbitrary decisions like "This magic makes you 10% more productive", you can utterly throw away your economics textbooks.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 06:23:24 PM
But even as you stated productivity/measure of output is relative. And that's productivity for what peasant? In what place? Void-vania?

Well I've seen numbers from ancient Greece & Rome, and estimates for various times in the Middle Ages - I think the latter was in A Farewell To Alms. They're basically the same, with a few slight upticks over time.

Manpower is extremely consistent, so productivity was extremely consistent. That changed utterly with industrialisation. Suddenly a US textile loom worker is (per Clark) 20 times more productive than an Indian textile loom worker - and that's with basically the same technology.

Quote from: S'mon on May 21, 2023, 06:29:36 PMWell I've seen numbers from ancient Greece & Rome, and estimates for various times in the Middle Ages - I think the latter was in A Farewell To Alms. They're basically the same, with a few slight upticks over time.

I meant like no place undergoing economic troubles, maybe excesses in one place, worse land in another, inefficient management in one specific 10 square miles?
I do recon that the average peasant did have the same "Productivity Output" generators throughout all of the time assuming they were agrarian and where modeling a specific set of time and place, and general geography.

Quote from: VisionStorm on May 21, 2023, 05:33:38 PM
I don't know about actual economy, GDP growth or production of goods, but suff like levels and XP are game constructs with no a direct real life parallel. And character progression can vary widely by campaign, based on the type of system used by the game or the GM. How XP awards themselves work are already a subject of debate and have a lot of built-in assumptions that are next to impossible to take as objective outside of "it works that way in my game". Stuff like XP for gold, for example, is something that could take up its own thread for me to explain why I hate it passionately and consider it a ridiculous game convention. It has no objective basis on reality outside of "it worked that way in old D&D and the OSR are obsessed with it".

So I'd definitely say that any system that purports to give "accurate" population numbers by character level would, by necessity be arbitrary. There's no way something based entirely around one person's interpretation of how XP awards and level progression should work (both of which are purely abstract game conventions that vary by game even within D&D/d20 System itself) could be anything but arbitrary, or work anywhere outside the context of a specific game built around a specific set of conceits that could not apply universally.

If you accept those conceits as something you want in your game it might give you figures, but whether those figures accurately reflect reality is up for grabs. Similar would apply to magic, since all of this stuff works based on conceits and rules for item creation and magic use that don't universally apply outside a specific game, and we have no way to verify in real life.

And this is not even getting into whether I truly need accurate population data and production figures to run an irregular elf game every few weeks where characters are just gonna crawl down a hole somewhere or invade an enemy encampment to kill some "bad guys" and take their gold. And the group might end up creating new characters before their current ones ever get to domain management stuff. That sort of stuff only works on a specific type of campaign with a specific type of player.

It doesn't have to model our history or our reality. It's derived in many ways from our history because it in many ways resembles our history, but it's not our history. What it does have to do is model a coherent, internally consistent world, and DM fiat does not do that. These tools let me quickly and easily develop a stunningly accurate and consistent new reality; if I had been left to do that on my own, it would be hours of research to determine things like "how many barons might one find in the service of a count?", "how much land does each of them rule?", "what's a plausible historic population density for agriculture vs mining vs pastoralism?". It's a monumental challenge because you can't just rip off history, but must instead understand how that would be different in a society with potential for extreme personal power, monsters in the wilds, and powerfully active magic. Handwaving away such concerns cheapens the depth of the game and makes it arbitrary. Having a rigorous and coherent framework actively makes the game less arbitrary.

The fact that certain fundamental inputs are chosen by the creator or DM doesn't make it arbitrary, any more than giving dragons a valuable treasure type is arbitrary. Dragons have a valuable treasure type because they guard great hordes and anything else wouldn't be an accurate model of the world they exist within. Exactly how large those hordes should be ought be determined by a confluence of the in-world economy and metagame incentive structure. Recognize that the opposite of arbitrary is reasoned, and the choice to give a dragon more treasure than a bear, even when they're the same HD, is a very intentional and reasoned choice. ACKS certainly establishes some ground rules for how XP works, but it also offers a rigorous defense of that at both practical and theoretical levels, and moreover it structures the game such that a DM following those basic guidelines tends to create certain outcomes.

You appear to want to critique ACKS rules for not applying universally . . . but that's literally true of all game rules. ACKS rules apply to ACKS, and they work exceptionally well there. If you're playing FATE or 5e, yeah, that's a different game. They're also IMO strictly worse games, because they don't have the framework to ensure that the world is coherent and that everything fits together in the background at whatever level of resolution you care to zoom in to. If your elfgame doesn't need accurate population demographics, good for you I guess, but mine does and is richer for it. That's necessary for players to conquer and rule domains, to make investments and engage in arbitrage trading, to take out loans (and how many adventures might that spark!), to hire henchmen, to engage in politics and magic research and burglary. And frankly, a game that doesn't have those things, or handwaves the important questions that they rely on, seems like a poorer game indeed.

Greetings!

I love having dynamics, mechanical rules, tables and systems in place that are grounded in reality, in actual, Historical facts and dynamics. It is precisely from such a foundational basis that I, as the GM, can then consciously exceed such dynamics, due to magic, or the gods, whatever--and understand what I am doing, and why--and also by doing so, be equipped with the strong data that tells me what the cascade effects are for a particular community, or a province, or an entire Kingdom.

The think that kind of research, thoughtfulness, and game design is extremely valuable, and worthwhile.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 06:23:24 PM

Quote from: S'mon on May 21, 2023, 06:18:20 PMpre-industrial numbers are amazingly consistent over time

But even as you stated productivity/measure of output is relative. And that's productivity for what peasant? In what place? Void-vania?

And all of this is for 100% real theoretical peasants. Now we introduce different locations, geographies, histories, and places and now estimating peasants of "Not the Real world-istan" becomes increasingly strenous.

And then we introduce magic. At which point, unless making arbitrary decisions like "This magic makes you 10% more productive", you can utterly throw away your economics textbooks.

Measure of output for historical agriculture isn't relative at all, it's grounded directly in volume of goods, and therefore how many people it can feed. Likewise, one peasant family producing 12 gp of goods per month isn't arbitrary at all, it's based on one denarius = one day's wage = one silver piece and makes it convenient to look up and convert historical prices over directly (before Amacris finished doing that for us, anyway ). There were certainly times in history where one denarius was more or less than a day's wage, but in terms of needing some baseline to calibrate things to, this is a pretty good and useful one to pick.

Introducing magic isn't just decided to make you 10% more productive. The spells that exist in B/X, or have been added later from a reconstructed framework to create similar spells, have been carefully accounted for in the continent-spanning economic model to determine their impact at scale and the implications of that on productivity, and there are thus concrete rules on how the availability of certain spells impacts construction speeds, etc. Likewise, the game has a (obviously fictional, but grounded in historic practices) complete metaphysical framework such that clerics who collect worship on behalf of their deities can also use that to bless and consecrate the land, and the extent to which that's feasible is grounded in those metaphysics. When the effects of magic are well understood, there's no reason at all they can't be integrated into economic models - it's just potentially a lot of work, but that's why I use ACKS instead of doing it myself.

Quote from: Arbrethil on May 21, 2023, 07:12:26 PM
Introducing magic isn't just decided to make you 10% more productive. The spells that exist in B/X, or have been added later from a reconstructed framework to create similar spells, have been carefully accounted for in the continent-spanning economic model to determine their impact at scale and the implications of that on productivity, and there are thus concrete rules on how the availability of certain spells impacts construction speeds, etc. Likewise, the game has a (obviously fictional, but grounded in historic practices) complete metaphysical framework such that clerics who collect worship on behalf of their deities can also use that to bless and consecrate the land, and the extent to which that's feasible is grounded in those metaphysics. When the effects of magic are well understood, there's no reason at all they can't be integrated into economic models - it's just potentially a lot of work, but that's why I use ACKS instead of doing it myself.

And here's what I think Shrieking Banshee means... B/X magic assumptions only work for a game based on B/X magic and those assumptions are "arbitrary" to the setting.

That means they're worthless for modeling a world with a different magic system where magic is skill-based at-will casting. I doubt it maps well to a world where steam power exists (ie. a Steampunk setting).

Let's throw in precursor Stargate-like teleporter circles, airships, genetically engineered dinosaurs and rampaging mecha-kaiju on top of that. For good measure let's throw in an apocalypse two centuries back that wiped out 99.9% of a previous global population of 10 billion (so down to 10 million within a year, then rose to a current 30-40 million globally).

A model based on B/X magic and technology assumptions is going to spew out nonsense on the other side of the calculations because it's not an accurate model for anything but B/X assumptions... which were the arbitrary decisions of its creators.

Coolness, I like that kind of analysis. 

In some of the settings that I have home brewed over the years, I imagined a steampunk-ish D&D world where Elemental Engines (literally based on summoned Elementals) transformed transportation and industry.  Of course, that was causing all kinds of economic and social ripples through the land.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 21, 2023, 08:22:23 PM

Quote from: Arbrethil on May 21, 2023, 07:12:26 PM
Introducing magic isn't just decided to make you 10% more productive. The spells that exist in B/X, or have been added later from a reconstructed framework to create similar spells, have been carefully accounted for in the continent-spanning economic model to determine their impact at scale and the implications of that on productivity, and there are thus concrete rules on how the availability of certain spells impacts construction speeds, etc. Likewise, the game has a (obviously fictional, but grounded in historic practices) complete metaphysical framework such that clerics who collect worship on behalf of their deities can also use that to bless and consecrate the land, and the extent to which that's feasible is grounded in those metaphysics. When the effects of magic are well understood, there's no reason at all they can't be integrated into economic models - it's just potentially a lot of work, but that's why I use ACKS instead of doing it myself.

And here's what I think Shrieking Banshee means... B/X magic assumptions only work for a game based on B/X magic and those assumptions are "arbitrary" to the setting.

That means they're worthless for modeling a world with a different magic system where magic is skill-based at-will casting. I doubt it maps well to a world where steam power exists (ie. a Steampunk setting).

Let's throw in precursor Stargate-like teleporter circles, airships, genetically engineered dinosaurs and rampaging mecha-kaiju on top of that. For good measure let's throw in an apocalypse two centuries back that wiped out 99.9% of a previous global population of 10 billion (so down to 10 million within a year, then rose to a current 30-40 million globally).

A model based on B/X magic and technology assumptions is going to spew out nonsense on the other side of the calculations because it's not an accurate model for anything but B/X assumptions... which were the arbitrary decisions of its creators.

That is correct, but that's not what ACKS is. ACKS has rules for:
- At-will skill-based casting (ceremonial magic, found in Heroic Fantasy Handbook)
- Spontaneous casting expending spell points and designing magic effects on the fly (spellsinging, found in Heroic Fantasy Handbook)
- High-tech as magic (terran engineering, found in Almanac of Unusual Magic)
- Steampunk technology (automatons, found in By This Axe)
- Early Modern technology (firearms, cannons, found in Guns of War)
For each game mechanic I have published explanations of how it works, how it was built, and how to customize it if your setting differs. So if the accusation is "it assumes the world works like BX," that's not correct at all. It doesn't make those assumptions. ACKS can be used to run Lord of the Rings, Conan, Earthsea, Game of Thrones, all of which have very different assumptions about magic.

Arbitrary: This seems a definitional debate. I found three definitions of arbitrary.
1. "Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle."
2. "Relating to a decision made by a court or legislature that lacks a grounding in law or fact."
3. "Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference."

By definition 1 and 2, none of the decisions I made in ACKS are arbitrary. They are all grounded in necessity, reason, or principle.

By definition 3, all of the decisions I made in ACKS are arbitrary because I designed it using my individual judgment. But by that definition all game design is always arbitrary, so that seems like a pointless thing to say. "Alex's design is based on design by Alex" is a tautology.

So to be clear I am stating that ACKS is not arbitrary under meaning 1 or 2.